


Adrift Ashore

by smaller



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: 19th century problems, Amnesia, Domesticity, F/M, Mrs. Williams/Mrs. Morris if you squint - Freeform, Multi, Other, and casual ableism, but don't get your hopes up they're the merest footnote to this story, like menageries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:58:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smaller/pseuds/smaller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Aubrey was having a devil of a day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adrift Ashore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whiterabbit1613](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiterabbit1613/gifts).



> _The happiest of Yuletides to you, my dear. I hope this finds you well. I was tasked to write this story, and write it I have - though you will find that I have taken such liberties within that any medical mind would despair of reading it. I am well aware of the inaccuracies I have committed, however, I beg your indulgence for the purpose of simple entertainment._
> 
> _I am most humbly yours,  
>  S--_
> 
> \---
> 
> (Set in the period just after the end of “The Yellow Admiral”, before the planned Chilean mission. The Hundred Days would have begun before this fic could happen, but, I decided, if POB Himself can stretch out the length of the war to tell his stories during it, I can stretch out the length of the peace to do the same.)
> 
> (And finally, my deepest thanks to [elfhawk3](http://archiveofourown.org/users/elfhawk3), for helping me bounce ideas around and for giving me several very speedy and very helpful beta-reads when the deadline was approaching with all the promised doom of a leeward shore. This fic would not have happened without her.)
> 
> \---

Jack Aubrey was having a devil of a day.

To be more precise, Jack Aubrey was having a devil of a week. Domestic life at Woolhampton, spending time with Sophie and the children, was all very well, but Jack longed to be at sea. Alas, Surprise was still in the process of refitting and would not be sea-ready for some months yet, and so Jack was required to busy himself ashore, with all its complications and unstraightforward wrangling with lawyers and dockyard officials. But within the last few days he had been subjected to a series of vexations that had caused a surprisingly lingering temper in a man of so usually a sanguine, genial disposition.

The modest little observatory Jack had built for himself - his tutor in telescope-making had been Caroline Herschel herself, and he’d ground the mirrors _just so_ \- had been utterly destroyed by a fire, to Jack’s extreme regret, though fortunately the house and lands had not suffered. The very next day, his son George had fallen from a tree and broken his leg. Jack’s friend Stephen Maturin, an eminent physician who nearly always accompanied him to sea as his ship’s surgeon, had treated the leg according to the Basra method - no chance of gangrene, thank God - and expressed full confidence in George’s eventual recovery, yet this necessarily delayed Jack’s being able to send him to apprentice aboard a friend officer’s ship to begin a naval career as early as possible. It was deeply frustrating. And most recently, an unfortunate incident when his cousin Diana - his wife Sophie’s cousin, that is, and Stephen’s wife - was showing the paces of the fine Arabian horses she was breeding, much to the admiration of the entire household: one of the vile beasts had fetched Jack a very cruel bite, completely unprovoked. He was limping yet.

Today’s trials had begun with the arrival of Jack’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Williams, and her friend Mrs. Morris, in the very small hours of the morning. A scarcity of horses at no fewer than two of the posting houses on the way had caused their trip to be delayed well into the night, and Mrs. Williams had adamantly refused to stop for the night in any of the inns - dingy and full of scoundrels, as she put it - on her way to take up residence in one of the unused wings of Woolhampton.

The entire house had necessarily been roused to receive her, a great hullabaloo, and by the time everyone was able to return to their beds even Sophie, who always had a seemingly boundless tolerance for her mother, was beginning to show signs of cracking at last. Indeed, Sophie had to withdraw prematurely, leaving the servants to Mrs. Williams’ mercy, before she could say something criminally impertinent. Jack had withdrawn with her, not trusting himself either without Sophie’s quelling influence.

Jack had managed a few more hours of sleep, but was required to rise again before dawn in order to be dressed and shaved and in his finery as lord of Woolcombe Manor to open the Old Lammas Day Fair on Simmon’s Lea.

The fair itself started well, and it showed every indication of continuing to be a truly splendid affair throughout the day. Livestock were already being traded in a very lively fashion, one could scarcely walk without falling over yet another vendor of pastries or sweetmeats, and there were a very gratifying number of attractions - strongmen, boxers, jugglers, _four_ bearded women this year, and, to the delight of all save the beasts themselves, a traveling menagerie.

Jack had every intention of visiting the fair later in the day, perhaps taking Sophie and George to see the the fair - his girls Fanny and Charlotte were still away at boarding school alas, but he remembered how impressed he had been by fire-eaters and dancing bears and such at George’s age, and Stephen was almost certainly there already with Diana and their daughter Brigid. Jack was still engaged, however, in clearing the remains of his perished observatory, and he intended to make the most of their first decently cool morning in weeks in order to shift the heaviest charred timbers he’d not yet hauled away. In this he had the assistance of Barrett Bonden, his coxswain, and Preserved Killick, his steward, old shipmates both, who had followed him these many years from commission to commission, and, quite often as it turned out, ashore as well, being much attached to their captain. Together the three had rigged a sturdy wooden frame to bear a system of tackles and lines of rope - very gratifying to a naval mind - to aid in hoisting the debris so that Jack might salvage what he could.

Killick was a habitual nag and positively despised seeing the Captain’s fine clothes worn under strenuous circumstances - or under any circumstances, if he could help it. Good coats should be wrapped in tissue paper and packed carefully away in a trunk, never to be damaged - and he had successfully chivvied Jack into a thoroughly disreputable old shirt and trousers. He and Bonden were scarcely more civilly attired, and the three of them worked among the ash and char in a companionable, competent quiet for quite some time. Shovels were used to clear away small debris until they freed a large beam or other such object, at which point Jack and Killick would lever it up enough for Bonden to pass a line securely about it. Then Killick would haul the object aloft by means of the tackle system, and Jack would carefully direct it into a wheelbarrow or a wagon, depending on its size, to be hauled away at a later point. It was slow going, and as the morning wore on Jack was sadly disappointed in his hopes of finding much of his observational equipment that hadn’t been irreparably damaged by heat or collapse.

They had been at this for some hours when Jack’s belly, aggrieved at having been fed only coffee and a small breakfast, made its displeasure known. Jack himself was aggrieved at having just unearthed one of his mirrors, cracked and nearly unrecognizable, but he tamped down on his displeasure as best as he could, deciding to call a halt for the day.

‘Well, Bonden, Killick,’ he began, but at that very moment some deep hidden flaw or imperfection in the wooden frame above, slowly aggravated by strain and by the fact that the screws holding the pulley in place had been driven right through this weakness in the wood, caused the whole apparatus to give way, entirely without warning. Jack had just enough time to throw an arm up before he felt something strike his head, and he knew no more.

***

Bonden and Killick had both been standing beyond the radius of this collapse, and they looked on in shock as the entire assembly came down around Captain Aubrey. Something, Bonden wasn’t entirely certain what, hit Jack somewhere about his head and he fell to the ground. Bonden leaped forward to drag his captain - sixteen stone, by God - clear. Killick, after a stunned moment, helped him, and together they got Jack to a reasonably comfortable-looking patch of grass and considered him. He was entirely limp and his face was an unsavory grey color, but he wasn’t bleeding and he was, in fact, breathing, which allowed Bonden in turn to breathe again also.

‘Should we carry his honor up to the house, d’you think?’ asked Killick, his normally shrewish expression pinched in worry for once instead of disapproval. Bonden considered what little he knew of blows to the head. In action at sea they usually dragged the unfortunate buggers what copped it about the pate down the hatchways to the surgeon in the orlop, but he felt unsure that this was the right course of action on land. He was thinking of the time when the Doctor himself had been flung against a gun on Surprise, and been in a dead coma for days.

Bonden frowned. ‘I think we dursn’t move him, and should go find the Doctor and bring him here. Heads is no laughing matter, mate, as the Doctor told me himself all last year. What if his wits should be scrambled?’

They emptied the wheelbarrow onto the ground, and positioned it to hide Jack’s prone form as best they could from anyone on the lane who might glance his way, and then headed towards the fair at a brisk clip. Killick muttered most of the way about how should they ever find the Doctor, in that press of lubbers and pickpockets, but Bonden expressed confidence that the Doctor would be found gazing at the beasts in the menagerie, and begged Killick to ‘Put a fucking stopper in it’. Killick looked sideways at Bonden and fell silent, and after a moment he patted Bonden’s shoulder in a comforting manner. Bonden said nothing more, and they hurried on.

He turned out to be quite right, to his silent relief. Once they reached the train of wheeled cages at the further edge of the fair, Bonden easily spotted the Doctor, standing there with Mrs. Maturin and their little girl and pointing at something hairy while saying, he learned as they drew near, something incomprehensible about its bowels. The child, Brigid, saw Bonden and ran up to him, and he was more than happy to sweep her up and place her on Killick’s shoulders while he explained to the Doctor what had happened.

The Doctor’s expression grew grave as he listened, and when Bonden had finished the short account he turned to his wife, saying quietly, ‘My dear, pray take Brigid up to the house. Jack has suffered an injury and I must see to him at once.’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Diana, who had been standing quite near enough to hear, ‘I suppose you’ll want someone to bring down a cart?’

‘Which we’ve got a wheelbarrow, don’t we,’ muttered Killick, but not very loudly. To his mind this seemed little more serious than those times when a sailor (or officer) would drink himself into a stupor and have to be lashed to a shingle and carried home by his shipmates to sleep until his head were clear. He was currently holding Brigid in the air so that she could get a closer look at a brace of small creatures very like hideous rabbits with shells, and she was keeping up a steady stream of excited commentary.

‘If you would be so good,’ Stephen replied, ‘thank you kindly, my dear. Preserved Killick,’ raising his voice to be heard over Brigid, ‘in cases of this sort it is seldom advisable to convey the patient in as cramped and fractious a vehicle as a wheelbarrow. A cart will do very well. Brigid, come away from those armadillos and follow your mother. We shall come back to see them again.’ And with that he followed the seamen back towards the observatory.

Stephen was quite out of breath when they arrived, and the other two in their hurry of spirits were only slightly less so. Bonden led the group at last past the rubble and around the wheelbarrow, only to stop once there and exclaim, ‘God love us! The Captain’s gone!’

***

His head ached abominably, and he was laying on something unyielding and uncomfortable. Groaning, he pulled himself upright and looked around, wincing in the bright light. He was on a gently sloping ground, next to an overturned wheelbarrow, and he had no idea why he was there. Furthermore, when he put his mind to the question, he also found that he didn’t know his name either, which struck him as the sort of thing a man ought to know. His face felt sunburned and he was hungry, but at the same time he had the oddest sense of freedom, as if a world of cares had been lifted away from him, along with any knowledge of what had brought him to be lying on a blackguardly old coat in the grass with a head that felt like an eighteen-pounder had been blazing away inside it for the last watch. He frowned, confused at the mental image and why it should have occurred to him, and set about investigating his pockets to see whether they held any answers.

Apart from a pained skull and the dirt and ash coating his hands and clothing, he found nothing to explain his circumstances, though he did find a pocket watch monogrammed ‘J.A.’, and a purse containing a number of large coins and smaller change, a truly shocking quantity of currency when taken together with the workman’s clothes he was wearing. Suspicious, he examined the ties on the purse, but they seemed perfectly whole and intact, not at all as if he had cut it from a wealthy man’s belt. He supposed he could still have picked someone’s pocket to have come by the gold, but then again he was wearing a wedding ring that fit as if it was his, good boots that also fit, and the watch’s weight seemed familiar in his hand. He decided to form the not entirely unwelcome conclusion that he was probably an honest enough cove - he certainly didn’t _feel_ like a scrub - and the items truly did belong to him, unlikely as it appeared.

‘ _J.A._ ,’ he said aloud, gazing at the timepiece. ‘I wonder does it stand for John?’ His voice echoed forlornly in the empty space, and of a sudden he felt very exposed and vulnerable, without a soul in sight. He shivered in the sunlight and stood carefully, using the wheelbarrow to support himself through the accompanying dizziness until he felt well enough to step out on his own.

There was a lane close by, and when he squinted into the distance - southeast, his mind told him unbidden - he thought he could detect the faint noises and haze of civilization. Surely someone there would at least tell him where he was, and perhaps he could find something to eat. It was therefore with the satisfaction of having a plan of action firmly in mind, even if the mind was missing some of its more usual contents, that he set off.

***

Stephen was the first to break the silence. After peering intently at the ground and casting about, he said, ‘Listen now, Barrett Bonden: take yourself and Killick back and search for the Captain at the fair. He headed in that direction - we none of us wear boots that large,’ this was said while pointing at the very clear marks of his recent passage in the grass, for the seamen’s benefit, ‘and he could not yet have gotten far. I will go up to the house and tell Mrs. Aubrey what’s afoot. Do you both take particular care with him now when you find him. He is almost certainly concussed, and for him to have wandered off alone concerns me deeply as to his state of mind. I will be along as soon as I can. There is not a moment to lose.’

The sailors did as Stephen instructed, and he himself headed in the opposite direction, towards Jack’s family home, Woolcombe Manor. He met Diana on the way, driving a cart from the stableyard. She pulled to a stop when she saw him, and when he explained the change of circumstances she bade him climb onto the seat beside her.

‘I can drive you back to the house, at the very least. And then I’ll ride along and see whether he’s still on the road gone straight past the fair.’

At the house, Diana stopped at the stables to let a groom unhitch the cart while she saddled a horse to ride, and Stephen hurried into Woolcombe. There, in a drawing room, he found Sophie writing letters. ‘Why, Stephen!’ she cried, seeing him come in. ‘You’re back already?’ Sophie herself had no interest in seeing the fair. She disliked crowds and horses, she felt sorry for the caged menagerie beasts, she was rather frightened by fire-eating and dancing bears, and she was in fact faintly dreading Jack’s return to take her and George - able to get around admirably with a pair of crutches, especially when excited - to see it. Then, taking in Stephen’s countenance her face fell and she said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Listen, my dear. Jack had an accident and has suffered a blow to the head. By the time Bonden and Killick found me to take me to him, he had gotten up and is now wandering I believe somewhere in the vicinity of Simmon’s Lea.’ Sophie’s expression was one of dismay, and he added, patting her hand, ‘Never worry overmuch. It is serious, to be sure, but hardly dire. We shall find him and direct him back here to rest quietly until I have ascertained the extent of any trauma. Bonden and Killick are searching for him at the fair. I shall join them, and Diana has gone to check the roads. You must stay here to send out a message should any one of us find him before the others.’

Sophie was fretting inwardly, but nodded, and Stephen left.

***

After a brief discussion once back at the fair, Bonden and Killick had decided to double their chances of finding the Captain by splitting up.

Barrett Bonden, should anyone have asked him, would have said with a smirk that he thought he knew his captain tolerably well at this point in their long acquaintance. And so it was with a fair degree of confidence that he made his way through the throngs of fair-goers to the section of the common set aside for the prize-fighting matches.

He was right again. There, across the way, amid the loudly-cheering crowd surrounding a little roped-off dell, ground already bereft of grass and pounded hard by the boots of men intent on pummeling each other into insensibility, Bonden glimpsed Jack, with his unmistakable yellow hair and red-flushed, happy face.

Smiling broadly himself, Bonden walked forward with his hand waving to get the Captain’s attention through the din. ‘The Doctor’s compliments, and I’m to bring you to him directly, if you please, Sir.’

***

The lane had taken him through hedges and dells to the edge of a large common being used as a vast, noisy, bustling fairground. He was swallowed by the crowd immediately, and wandered through the fair with no particular destination in mind, following the general motion of the crowds, and stopping to observe interesting sights and smells. Deciding that miserliness was uncalled for, considering the contents of his purse, he did not hesitate to buy a tart or biscuit from every stall he passed. Surrounded by a sea of affable, happy people, he once again felt his spirits rising as if they’d not risen so in a great while, and it seemed to him as if the feeling was worth holding on to. For that reason, when he happened to spy one especially surly-looking, pigtailed fellow heading his way and muttering to himself, he immediately ducked around a haywain to avoid the man, that such obvious discontent might not spoil his delightful and inexplicable feeling of holiday.

Most of the people he met gave him no second glance, but a number of times he observed men or women to look sharply at his face and then take in his clothing with a puzzled air. After a moment this puzzlement usually resolved into an expression of understanding, and he would be given a knowing nod or a wink and chuckle, the person’s finger laid alongside their nose in a gesture of mutual conspiracy, without a word exchanged. He wanted to stop people at these junctures to ask just what they meant, but wasn’t sure what he should say. He seemed to be known, at least, and so he felt reasonably sure that if strangers knew who he was, eventually the knowledge must return to him too, as the return of the sea with the tide.

It was with these thoughts in mind that the sounds of cheering caught his ear and he followed them to a roped-off little hollow where two men were pummeling each other furiously under the eye of a referee and an excited audience. He stopped to watch with an appraising eye. The boxers were well-matched but didn’t seem to be professional fighters in the least. He several times noted an opening in one man’s guard that he certainly would have taken advantage of were he in the arena himself and soon found himself roaring out cheers and advice to one or the other in turns along with the other spectators.

One fell at last, to be dragged from the ring by his tutting friends while the winner staggered off into the arms of his cheering friends. He himself was in a fine flow of spirits, headache completely forgotten in the excitement, and when the referee addressed the crowd asking who wished to have a go next, he immediately stepped forward. The referee said, ‘Well enough milord, but you’ll need an opponent,’ and turning to the crowd he shouted, ‘Is there any stout enough to match ‘im?’

He scanned the crowd himself too, and there across the ring a man stepped out, waving. A big, powerful-looking fellow, about as broad in the chest as he had noted himself to be. ‘If you please, sir!’ the fellow was shouting.

The referee said, ‘In that case gentlemen, you may begin,’ and scurried from the ring. Wasting not a moment, he drew back his arm and swung a heavy blow towards the fellow’s head, fully expecting it to be blocked or dodged. His opponent, however, inexplicably stopped dead in his tracks in order to gape after the retreating referee, and turned back just in time to take the full force of the hit on the side of his jaw. He fell, with an expression of surprise still on his face, completely senseless.

It was a very disappointing turn of events, and despite the indiscriminate cheers of the crowd he felt vaguely guilty. Another pair of bruisers were already stepping into the ring as he hauled the man to a smaller roped-off area, where previous boxers of the day now in a similar state of both friendlessness and unconsciousness had been laid out to recover. Assuaging his spirit by tucking some shillings into the man’s boot by way of apology, he headed off to try and find some other diversion. There had been something familiar about the whole thing that he couldn’t quite put his foot on, and he pondered upon this as he let the crowd bear him away, avoiding a second time, incidentally, the surly-looking, pigtailed cove he’d seen earlier.

***

By judicious questioning of what observant-looking men and women he passed, Stephen determined to his satisfaction that Jack was indeed somewhere within the fair. He was trying to decide in which direction to search, for no one he spoke with had been able to state with confidence where precisely Jack might be, when he saw Killick, looking harried, together with a stranger, carrying Bonden between them on a board. He hurried to meet them and Killick launched into an explanation as soon as he saw Stephen.

‘Which I found the Captain’s coxswain laid out as pretty as you please, and snoring too! down in the Dripping Pan. I found old Joe here, who says he seen the Captain step into the prize-ring, and Bonden with him, and the Captain took one swing and that was it for old Bonden.’

During this, Stephen was examining the prone Bonden. He felt along his head, and while there was swelling and bruising, the skull and jaw were both whole and unbroken, to his infinite relief. Stephen sighed. There was a donkey and cart nearby, bearing a load of beer casks, and Stephen paid the owner for the loan of it, and once the other men had emptied the cart and deposited Bonden into it he also paid ‘old Joe’ for his help.

It was with this frustrating sense of delay that Stephen began his second return to the house, with an inert Bonden instead of an inert Jack. He couldn’t resent Bonden very much for it, they having formed a good friendship over the years, but the worry he felt for Jack despite his words to Sophie would not abate. The confusion of mind that must exist for Jack to have not only struck a subordinate of such long acquaintance but also to have gone on and left him behind in such a condition concerned Stephen extremely, and so it was with more force behind his words than he truly intended that he adjured Killick to continue looking for the Captain.

***

Killick was long accustomed to benign verbal abuse from the Captain and the Doctor, and had delivered his fair share of minimally-respectful nagging in return over the years, but as Stephen drove off Killick felt the first stirrings of uneasiness about the whole situation. After standing there for a moment in thought, he turned to the owner of the stack of beer casks and bought a mug to fortify himself. It wasn’t grog, but it would have to do.

***

‘Mrs. Oakes,’ Brigid begged - she was not _whining_ , _George_ whined, whereas Brigid always displayed good manners - ‘ _please_ may you take me to the fair? I’m after seeing the dancing bear, and the jugglers, oh _please_. What if the bear were to grow tired and stop dancing before I got to see it? Oh, t’would be the shame of the world, so it would, _please_.’

Clarissa considered. Mrs. Maturin had not expressly forbidden it, when she delivered Brigid to her care before leaving again in a hurry with little explanation - something about ‘Jack, the poor devil’, and Mrs. Williams was unlikely to rise early enough today to demand to see the children before dinner. Clarissa seldom felt ill-used by the Maturins, but she had dearly hoped to be able to enjoy the fair herself today, and being required to look after Brigid just when she had planned to step out had vexed her. She had looked forward to shooting for prizes, and she had never yet seen a dwarf.

She fixed Brigid with a look. ‘You must promise that you’ll not beg for biscuits, nor protest when I say we must leave, and that you’ll not give me any trouble when I bid you go to bed, for the next fortnight, at the very least.’ Brigid heartily promised all this and more, so Clarissa fixed bonnets about both their heads and went to let Sophie know.

Clarissa found Sophie in a surprising state of agitation, standing at the drawing-room window and wringing her hands. After the events of last winter the two of them were more kindly inclined towards each other, and Clarissa asked Sophie to tell her what was the matter. Sophie’s large eyes weren’t quite filled with tears, but it was a near thing as she related to Clarissa what Stephen had told her. Clarissa took Sophie’s hand and said, ‘I am taking Brigid down to the fair just now, and we will certainly keep a look out for your Jack.’ Brigid begged her Aunt Sophie not to worry, and said that her father should certainly find the Captain, hadn’t he found the neighbor’s little lost lamb not two months past? And so it was with Sophie in slightly better spirits that Mrs. Oakes and Brigid left the house. As they left, they saw the Doctor himself driving up in a donkey cart, but he looked so absolutely peevish that neither Clarissa nor Brigid chose to call to him, out of a sense of preservation for their not exactly illicit holiday.

***

Killick was growing more and more anxious. He’d twice seen clearly a ways off a figure he was certain had to be Captain Aubrey, but by the time he’d reached the place where he’d seen the Captain’s unmistakable shape, he was gone, with no way of telling where he’d got to. Killick couldn’t tell whether he was imagining it or not - he’d certainly not had nearly enough beer to be seeing phantasms - but in addition to those two clear certain sightings, he several more times felt as though he’d seen the Captain from out the corner of his eye, with no one there when he turned. If the Captain had been the sort to make game of a person Killick would have suspected him of it, but as it stood Killick wasn’t sure what to think. He continued stomping up and down the rows of vendors and performers, and his increasing agitation showed on his face. He wasn’t quite to the point of calling aloud like a fishwife, but it was a very near thing.

***

With most of the manor’s people out visiting the fair it took Stephen a intolerably long time to have Bonden extricated from the cart. Eventually, with the help of the butler and an arthritic old groom they set Bonden up comfortably enough in his room, and Stephen satisfied himself as to Bonden’s pulse and respiration, but the sun was already an hour’s length lower in the sky by the time he was able to make his way back to Simmon’s Lea with the donkey and cart. He urged the beast to what speed it was capable of and tried to curb his worry.

***

He’d seen that same ill-looking, pigtailed fellow at least a dozen times in the last hour, tankard in hand and pushing through the crowd with some purpose. It wasn’t difficult to avoid him, as a little observation showed that he was very purposefully marching down each haphazard, impermanent ‘street’, peering into every stall or arena he passed, and when he got to the end of each of the rows of congregated pedestrians that one couldn’t really term ‘boulevards’, he moved on to the next not-boulevard, and began again. Keeping out of the fellow’s path had in fact become something of a game he amused himself with, and each time they managed to pass without the fellow’s bloodshot eye alighting on him, he counted it a point. By now he thought he was up to fifteen.

At the moment he was rubbing his shoulder where it pained him: a troupe of acrobats he came across also had a strongman who allowed anyone singly or in pairs to challenge him to an arm-wrestle for a penny. The strongman had beaten him quite soundly, and the joint fairly ached. 

He was looking at the people in the area in order to see whether it was time to evade Pigtail again when a child’s lilting voice rose behind him, shrieking, ‘Oh Mrs. Oakes look, it’s Captain Jack it is!’ and a small figure thudded against his legs before wrapping itself around them.

He looked down at the girl, then up at a woman hurrying towards him. ‘Mrs. Oakes, I take it?’ he asked politely. ‘I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, ma’am.’ He saw surprise flash across her face, then realization, both quickly mastered.

‘Yes, Sir. I work in your home, and this is your cousin Brigid. Brigid, come away and let Captain Aubrey breathe.’ Mrs. Oakes peered at him before saying, ‘I am told you suffered a blow to the head. Your friends and family have been looking for you this last age. Will you accompany me back to them?’

‘Well, I suppose that explains _J.A._ ,’ he thought to himself.

It wasn’t a long walk Mrs. Oakes led him, but it wasn’t a short one either, and he had time to go from nervousness to eagerness and back to nervousness several times. The nervousness won out as they neared a large, rambling manor house, and his steps slowed. But the little girl, Brigid, who had kept up such an uninhibited flow of talk for the entire journey that it had distracted him reasonably well, tugged on his sleeve and kept him under way, and Mrs. Oakes opened the door and stepped inside. He followed her.

***

Killick returned to the vendor he’d bought his first beer from - the one with the donkey cart, now returned, he saw, meaning the Doctor was hereabouts somewhere - hours ago now. He’d searched the entire fair three times over without finding Captain Aubrey. His feet hurt, and he was certain that the next time he ran into the Doctor he’d be subjected to a wholly undeserved tongue-lashing for failing to locate the sod- that is, for failing to locate the Captain.

He paid for another drink and threw himself dejectedly onto a stool. The farmer selling beer took pity on Killick - he’d already taken a good deal of his money throughout the day, after all - and asked him what the trouble was.

Killick told him what the trouble was, in rather blasphemous detail, and the man answered, ‘What, you’re looking for his lordship the Captain? I saw him going up towards Woolhampton not ten minutes since!’

Killick leapt to his feet, outraged at this turn of events and what felt like a betrayal of all his hard work, and ran as fast as his abused feet would allow up the road towards the manor.

***

He stood nervously in the entranceway, Mrs. Oakes bidding him wait there, and she and Brigid disappeared somewhere within the house. He didn’t stand there long, however - a woman stepped into the hall, and stared at him. He stared back.

‘Jack,’ she said, stepping forward, her pretty brow creased. He had no idea what to say. She took another step. He cleared his throat, and opened his mouth to say - something - when the door behind him flew open with extreme force, and someone hit him bodily from behind, throwing him headfirst to the floor.

***

Jack blinked his eyes slowly open. His head felt a little sore, but it rested on soft pillows and lacked the urgent pounding he remembered from before. There was a cool, damp cloth draped over his forehead. ‘Jack,’ came Stephen’s voice beside him. ‘How glad I am to see you stir. How do you you do?’

‘Stephen,’ he cried, but winced and immediately modulated his tone. ‘There you are! But what- how did I come to be here? What happened?’

‘You led us all a merry chase, brother, so you did. It is still Wednesday afternoon. Do you recall nothing whatsoever?’

Jack considered. The bits of memory were falling properly into place, and he related what he could to Stephen, who in turn filled in the rest of the events.

‘And at last, when Killick came storming up to the house, certain that we’d all been having a laugh at his expense, so great was the speed and force of his entry that he bowled you right over, giving you another shrewd knock on the head. I arrived in fact on his heels - Diana had found me and we came back together - and satisfied myself that there was no fracture, and we got you into bed after that. Now that you are proved to be sound of mind, I must go see to Bonden. I advise you, furthermore, to go back to sleep if you can, restorative sleep, the better to speed you to full health. For your head still aches, does it not?’ Jack nodded carefully. Stephen’s hand touched Jack’s shoulder briefly. ‘I shall send Sophie in.’

Sophie came in. She took his hand, and Jack found he truly had nothing to say that he couldn’t say just as well by holding her hand in his, and Sophie was also quiet, gripping his hand tightly. For long moments they simply gazed at each other. Eventually, however, he spoke. ‘Sweetheart, Stephen tells me I ought to sleep again. He didn’t say you couldn’t sleep here with me, if you so chose.’

Sophie refreshed the damp cloth, but not before kissing him carefully on the forehead, and Jack fell asleep again with her in his arms. His last thought before sinking into deep slumber was that, if the day had ended like this, perhaps it hadn’t been so bad after all.


End file.
